SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure [LWN.net]

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 7:55 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
In reply to: SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure by dlang
Parent article: SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

>but unless a single application uses more than 3G of ram it usually won't matter much to the app if it's 32 bit or 64 bit.

Hell it will. Unless the program in question directly uses hand-tuned assembler, the 32-bit one will usually not run with SSE2, just the olde x87, which is slower, will be any computations involving larger-than-32 integers..

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SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 18:08 UTC (Thu) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]

Which is only partly true. Look into (/usr)?/lib/i686 and you'll see libs that will be loaded by the linker in preference to the plain ia32 ones if the hardware supports more than the least common denominator. It even works with /usr/lib/sse2 here on Debian if the package has support for it (see ATLAS or speex).

But of course, normally you don't rely on newer features everywhere, breaking support for older machines. Ubuntu goes i686 now, Fedora's already there, I think; and if you want more optimization I guess Gentoo is the way to go because you don't have to think portable. ;-)

SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Posted Jun 24, 2010 18:25 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Indeed, but that is for libraries only, it does not catch code inside programs or dlopened plugins.